The Obama Transparency Contagion…

Confession. I was just kidding way back in 2007 when I said Barack Obama sounded like the name of a strongman from a Caribbean banana republic.

Laughingly… I said it laughingly.

Newsmax:

A new report says the Obama administration moved to obstruct transparency shortly after the president took office in 2009, the Washington Examiner reported.

President Barack Obama promised a culture of transparency when he took office, but conservative government watchdog Cause of Action released a report Tuesday that says a previously overlooked 2009 memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig promoted a culture of opaqueness surrounding requests made through the Freedom of Information Act.

That memo directed executive branch officials to scrutinize any documents sought in FOIA requests that involved so-called “White House equities.” That exception gave the White House more leverage to redact or deny FOIA requests, according to the Cause of Action report.

“FOIA is designed to inform the public on government behavior; White House equities allow the government to withhold information from the media, and therefore the public, by having media requests forwarded for review,” the report states. “This not only politicizes federal agencies, it impairs fundamental First Amendment liberties.”

The Cause of Action analysis follows a report last week by the Associated Press that the Obama Administration either censored or denied requests for information made under the Freedom of Information Act in 2013 more than ever before.

A record 704,394 requests for information were made last year, up 8 percent from the previous year, according to the AP. The government responded to 96 percent of those requests, but “censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests.”

That included 8,496 times that the government denied requests citing national security – a 57 percent increase of such denials over 2012. That request was likely related to requests spurred by the revelation of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, according to the AP.

The AP also found that the National Security Agency censored or outright denied 98 percent of the FOIA requests it received. The Cause of Action report comes during Sunshine Week, a non-profit effort to raise awareness of the effort to ease access to public information. [More]

Of course the very suggestion that this White House isn’t the most transparent in history is totally ludicrous.

Ask Barack Obama anything, anything at all.

Ask Jay Carney anything, anything at all.

Go ahead, just ask anyone in this White House, Mr. and Ms. Teabagger!

I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!